Why Are Highly Educated Americans Getting More Liberal?
It's a well-worn (if not-entirely-agreed-upon) idea that college makes people more liberal. But a new report adds a twist to this: the most educated Americans have grown increasingly liberal over the last couple of decades.
A report from the Pew Research Center finds a wide partisan gap between highly educated and non-highly-educated Americans. Not only that, but the share of college grads and post-graduates who are "consistently liberal" (based on their answers to a series of policy questions) has grown sharply in the last 20 years.
Conservatives have shifted, too
It's not that conservatives haven't grown more conservative over the years, in Pew's estimation; according to their data, both sides have polarized. It's just that conservatives don't have this kind of education-related pattern.
(And to be clear, not all political scientists agree that the electorate is all that ideologically polarized. Some say it's more that affective polarization has grown — put simply, that each side increasingly dislikes the other.)
So if ideological polarization is real, where is conservatives' rightward shift showing up? According to Pew, age is one big area. Republican and GOP-leaning Baby Boomers and Generation Xers (and, to a lesser extent, members of the "Silent Generation" — people born between 1928 and 1945 here) have shifted rightward since the 1990s, Pew found.
